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Still don't have time to dig into this. Will probably also forgot 90% of the stuff that's been buzzing around my head that I didn't have the time to put down earlier, but let's start with Trump and inflation.

Despite his serial bankruptcies, paternal nepotism and welfare, Trump doubtless probably believes he's a great businessman even though all his truly successful ventures were someone else's pitch and someone else did all the work, whether it's his books, his brand licencing, his TV shows, etc. All of that was someone else. Trump didn't even like most of the ideas when he first heard them.

But his actual bricks and mortar relics - well if a property was worth 10M, he'd try and buy it for 3-4, with dirty tricks to boot if he could. He'd then swear to the tax people it was only worth 1, while telling everyone else it was worth 30-40. (Ignoring all his dubious subcontracting and hiring 'practices'.

And so in an inflationary market, while real estate tends to outstrip inflation in most markets, a 10M building would have to be worth 26.5M, 20 years later to keep pace with annual inflation of 5%. Trump would be the last person ever to think in real terms for anything, let alone economics, so inflation doesn't devalue things, it makes him look successful (in his own eyes).

And so when you look at the giants of economics of the 20thC, Keynes and his countercyclical management did win the sensible battles despite being terribly out of fashion by those that wanted to wish otherwise, but his main counterschool came from Hayek, and Hayek was actually motivated by his experiences in Austria post WWI, where the Central Powers countries were crippled by reparations and the status quo with all of its inequality was routed by hyperinflation, and all the old money and family fortunes vanished in a twinkling. Hayek blamed governance. But the spectre was actually inflation. And so you have Western macroeconomic interventory monetary policy for a very long time focusing on ensuring inflation stayed at manageable levels, and then you had Japan's largely demographically initiated lost decade, and then decades later the GFC, and the countries that had aimed to indirectly reduce inflation to 2% to maintain a healthy economy, suddenly thought a healthy economy meant they should indirectly try to raise inflation to 2%. And so here we are now, with markets flirting with 2%, a change in Fed chair, and the softly, softly, let's not spook the markets woman has gone. (Not to mention the Fed gets oversight for some of the financial measures the lobbyists want Trump to repeal) The first time Yellen wasn't doing a 'I don't understand why this isn't showing up yet', or her other phrases to calm things down and this happened. And Trump wants to pour rocket fuel on it.

Fucking moron. He probably still can't understand while certain 'good fundamentals' are bad for equity bubbles.

(too tired to write anything that makes sense, or to check I'm not full of shit)

I saw it noted that there are 22 stable liberal democracies in the world (that is, continuously democratically governed, with civil liberties guaranteed, since 1950). In no particular order, these are Austria, Germany(/West Germany), Italy, France, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Japan, Costa Rica, and the United States of America.

One interesting thing to note about this list is that only two use the US model: the US itself, and Costa Rica. All the others use a parliamentary confidence system of some sort.

At this point, with all the electoral and other political fuckery going on in the US, and the effective eradication of various civil liberties (4th Amendment anyone?), I'm not sure if the US belongs on that list any longer.

What I find particularly amusing about it is that half of the countries on that list are monarchies.

This is what happens when your only metric for success is popularity. Doesn't matter if you're a proven racist, barely literate, and rapidly succumbing to the ravages of old age; if you can appeal to lots of people, you're in.

And you don't even have to appeal to more people than your opponent because the electoral system is an outmoded piece of shit!

I think the problem is, is that computer science as a whole and tech as a whole has a reputation of being a very geeky male industry. And so if you look, not within the industry, but just as an educational pipeline, you see that we only have 20 percent of women graduating with computer science degrees, and that’s a problem in and of itself, because that means we don’t have enough people graduating who have those degrees. And you say, well, why is that? I think it has to do with these perceptions that the computer industry is, a geeky, not very interesting, not social industries, and it just couldn’t be further from the truth.

Quote from: Sundar Pichai

But I'm saying the representation matters. Right, so the way you solve this is by increasing the percentage of women in the tech industry. So, we need to make the environment more welcoming, we need to make the jobs more interesting.

Sounds to me like "women are underrepresented in tech because they generally don't find it interesting. We need to find ways to appeal to them." Which is exactly what Damore recommended:

Quote from: James Damore

Below I'll go over some of the differences in distribution of traits between men and women that I outlined in the previous section and suggest ways to address them to increase women's representation in tech without resorting to discrimination.

And then he goes on to list methods to appeal to women. But if the media says he's a male chauvinist gatekeeper, then it must be true.

I have to disagree with you there. The party leaders aren't stupid. They're a far cry from those ignorant enough to be duped into voting against their own interests. On the contrary, they're intelligent and well educated enough to make the former happen in the first place, often through some rather sophisticated psychological trickery. They know full well that they're peddling bullshit. If they honestly believed in what they were doing, then lobbyists would have no reason to spend such obscene amounts on them in the first place.

This is what happens when your only metric for success is popularity. Doesn't matter if you're a proven racist, barely literate, and rapidly succumbing to the ravages of old age; if you can appeal to lots of people, you're in.